Two Things Informatica Does For Redshift That Get Data Geeks Excited

With tons of customers already at full-throttle on production-scale workloads on Redshift, there’s two things we wanted to announce at re:invent – the Informatica Cloud Test Drive for Amazon Redshift, and the AWS Marketplace SKUs for Redshift. Over the years, our customers realized that they had a much more complex set of requirements with Redshift – it was not enough to just load raw data into Redshift. To truly make it useful, other data sources had to be joined, aggregated, and transformed before running various data warehousing processes.

We saw several cloud-first customers use Redshift to do deeper analysis on data from SaaS applications such as Salesforce. In fact, one such example is our customer Red Hat, who used Informatica Cloud to integrate and analyze data from Salesforce, S3, and Redshift. That’s when it dawned upon us to create a solution that allowed users to perform end-to-end cloud data warehousing and BI.

When we went to our strategic partner, Amazon, we were told about their Test Drive program, and how we could build an out-of-the-box solution on an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and provision it to users who wanted to dive a little bit deeper. Our Test Drive for Amazon Redshift consists of the following use cases, and allows users 4 hours to try them all out, as if they were in a hands-on lab:

Replicating Salesforce data to a MySQL database in Amazon RDS

Using Amazon RDS as a staging area and synchronizing new batches of data with Amazon Redshift

Perform advanced integration seamlessly between Redshift and Tableau

We made sure that each of the above use cases gave a broad flavor of Informatica Cloud’s data integration capabilities. For instance, use case #1 leverages our Data Replication Service, use case #2 depends on our Data Synchronization Service, and the third use case makes use of our Cloud Mapping Designer. With Data Replication, you can easily detect which objects within Salesforce have changed so that you can save time by only replicating those parts of the scheme which have changed. Data Synchronization allows you to easily update and insert newly changed records so that you don’t have to write manual SQL scripts to do so.

A lot of our startup customers who run all their IT operations and infrastructure on AWS requested that we create SKUs that are more usage-based. And so we’re happy to announce that we’ve released two AWS Marketplace SKUs for Redshift: one for customers using Windows AMIs and another for customers using Linux. These SKUs allow you to load and transform up to 1TB of data between Redshift and two other connectors. We have both hourly pricing as well as annual pricing – you save 99% with the latter. You’ll also have access to Informatica Cloud’s advanced Mapping Designer that give you access to a vast library of advanced transformations as you move your Redshift data around.

We’ll be at booth #937 all week long. Drop by if you have any questions on the Test Drive or our Marketplace SKUs. Happy re:inventing!